[5] In a conversation with Jove, the paramount chieftain of the Bassa ethnic peoples of coastal Liberia, Sessing recalled the king reiterating the widely held notion in nineteenth century colonial West Africa that the Bible was a book for Europeans while fetish or idolatry was central to African traditional beliefs.

[5][13][14][18] According to oral traditions, at a farewell durbar organised in honour of Riis, the king of Akuapem, Omanhene, Nana Addo Dankwa, is known to have stated, “How can you expect so much from us?

A similar idea had been passed on by English missions in London to Basel but the final decision on West Indian recruitment was motivated by the chief's message to Riis.

[13][14] Riis arrived at the Basel headquarters on 7 July 1840 and consulted with the Home Committee that had already decided to end the mission's West African evangelical effort.

[13][14] Riis asked the committee members to re-evaluate their decision by narrating Nana Addo Dankwa's valedictory speech to the Basel directors.

J. Miller, a representative of the Africa Civilization Society, Riis was able to recruit candidates after a mass campaign across the island and a rigorous selection process.

Another had a sickly wife who was too ill to travel whereas other potential recruits wished to the motherland as part of the “Back to Africa” movement, evangelism being of least priority to them.

[18][19] In metaphor of the Biblical Joseph story, a team of 24 Jamaicans and one Antiguan (6 distinct families and 3 bachelors) sailed from the Jamaican Port of Kingston on 8 February 1843 aboard the Irish brigantine, The Joseph Anderson, rented for £600, and per varying accounts, arrived in Christiansborg, Gold Coast on Easter Sunday, 16 April or Easter Monday, 17 April 1843 at about 8 p.m. local time, GMT after sixty-eight days and nights of voyage, enduring a five-day tropical storm on the Caribbean sea, shortage of fresh water and an oppressive heat aboard the vessel.

[21] Accompanying them was Thompson's new wife, Catherine Mulgrave, an Angolan-born, Jamaican trained mission schoolteacher who later ran a girls’ school in Christiansborg.

[2] They also had with them donkeys, horses, mulls and other animals and agricultural seeds and cuttings such as mango seedlings which they were going to introduce to the Gold Coast food economy.

[14][15][18] The Caribbean recruits also brought new seedlings with them: cocoa, coffee, breadnut, breadfruit, guava, yam, cassava, plantains, cocoyam, banana and pear.

[18] Andreas Riis and another Basel missionary, Simon Süss were compelled to trade and barter in order to fund essential needs of the growing mission.

The Basel missionaries transferred Alexander Worthy Clerk, George Thompson, and his young bride, Catherine to Christiansborg to establish an English-language school on the coast, on behalf of the society.

Salem's school curriculum was quite comprehensive: English and Ga languages, arithmetic, geography, history, religious knowledge, nature study, hygiene, handwriting and music.

[8][9] The introduction of English as the lingua franca in school gained wide acceptance after the Danes sold their fortresses on the eastern part of the Gold Coast including Osu, to the British in 1850.

[8] A vehicle for upward mobility, several of the school's alumni later became administrators, accountants, bankers, civil servants, dentists, diplomats, engineers, judges, lawyers, medical doctors, political leaders, professors, technocrats and teachers in the colonial era.

From the 1850s to the 1950s, Salem alumni were active in public life and elite society, and formed the upper crust in the Gold Coast colonial social hierarchy.

[8] In 1842, when the Basel Mission recruitment team visited Jamaica, George Peter Thompson fell in love with sixteen-year old Catherine Mulgrave.

Upon the recommendation of the Moravian church and the tacit approval of the Basel mission, Mulgrave though initially undecided accepted Thompson's proposal.

[2] As a divorced woman with young children to feed, she found it difficult to live on her meagre teacher's salary as her ex-husband, Thompson had been expelled from the mission and had departed the Gold Coast.

[2][9][10] The Basel missionaries on the Gold Coast petitioned the Home Committee on her behalf, detailing her financial difficulties and requesting for debt forgiveness for unpaid loans from the mission, relating to essential needs for her children.

[3] In December 1846, it was disclosed through mutual watchfulness and reporting to superiors by a co-worker that Thompson was having multiple extra-marital affairs with the Ga-Dangme women at Christiansborg and allegedly with three girls at the school.

[3] In an official report to Basel, Thompson was described as having “sunk deep morally...always suspect to us and one could not expect anything good from him because of his conduct.”[1] Some of scholars have posited that, as a tragic character, Thompson was detached from his native African culture and Liberian origins due to the separation of time and place while growing up in Europe, leading to a loss of identity, making him out of sync with his Basel missionary colleagues.

[1][3][4] Thompson made a direct complaint to the Home Committee about being demeaned by his fellow missionaries and this was corroborated in a letter written by Hermann Halleur on 30 April 1844 to his brother.